From the Desk of the Editors

Dear Reader…

Welcome back to another thrilling issue of the Game Workers Unite magazine.
By the time this mag, hot off the presses, reaches your shaking, excited hands,
GWU will be celebrating its first anniversary. We thought we'd take a moment
to reflect on the tidings of the past year, both good and ill.

You might not recognize all these names, but if you've been in the industry for
a while there's a good chance you know someone who's been affected. Between
September and October 2018 alone, at least 800 game workers lost their jobs.
February 2019's toll stands at at least 1000 lost jobs. With the swift drop
of an axe, the Firemonkeys layoffs singlehandedly shrank the Australian games
industry workforce by 5% — just months after they extended an invitation to
former Capcom and Telltale employees on Twitter noting they were
hiring. All in
all, thousands of industry jobs have been lost over the past year.

Why are all these layoffs happening, you ask? Why, record-breaking revenues, of
course! In a press release to investors the day layoffs started at Activision,
CEO Bobby Kotick
wrote:
"While our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we
didn't realize our full potential." (Full potential? Seriously? He sounds like
a parent disowning their child for getting perfect grades and an inbox full of
scholarship offers. We'd also be remiss to fail to note that Kotick himself is
one of the highest-paid CEOs — not just in the games industry, not just in tech,
not just in America, but everywhere, of all time.) Elsewhere, Telltale's fall
from massive critical and commercial success, widely attributed to routine
mismanagement and nearsighted pursuit of profit on the part of its shareholders,
is by now well-documented.

It's been a rough, scary year for those of us working in the industry, and signs
don't point to things getting better anytime soon. But we're starting to fight
back.

In that same year of tumult, over 25 local chapters of Game Workers Unite
were founded around the world. Earlier this year, GWU
UK formed an official trade union in partnership
with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), joining the Syndicat
des Travailleuse·eur·s du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) in France and the Game Makers of
Finland as one of the first official unions representing game workers. GWU
members have made zines, pamphlets, and other
literature, and we've
organized or taken part in dozens of panels, presentations, workshops, and
public events. We've spoken to press, podcasters, and YouTubers, and helped
shine a light on working conditions in the industry and the urgent need for
unionization.

But more than all that, we've been engaging in on-the-ground organizing.
We've been forming workplace committees and building collective power to win
concrete demands. There's a lot of underground work happening that you won't
hear about because of the risks for the workers involved, but we've already
helped win gratifying legal victories against some of the industry's most
powerful bosses and reclaim stolen wages. This is arguably the most
critical work we've been doing. Organizing is a long haul, and doing it in the
open would only put workers' jobs and well-being on the line. But a sea change
is happening, even if you can't feel the waves from the shore.

Crucially, we're not alone. The international labour movement is picking up
steam: in India, between 150 and 200 million workers joined a general strike
against the Modi government's anti-labour policies. (For context, a strike of
comparable size in Europe would include the entire combined labour force of
the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.) The 2018 US prison
strike, where inmates demanded an end to prison slavery, dehumanizing
conditions, and racial discrimination, saw participation in at least 17 states
and solidarity actions across North America and around the globe.

Even in the tech sector (which historically has not been fertile ground for
labour organizing) significant movements and actions are taking place. At
Google, employees banded together to protest military AI contracts and
organized a walkout against sexual
harassment and a culture hostile to marginalized people. At Microsoft, workers
are organizing against the use of their products for border policing and the
surveillance of journalists and
activists and
against the militarization of consumer technology like the
Hololens (which also concerns us, as many of
these technologies are also developed for or used in games). Groups like Tech
Workers Coalition are gaining traction as they support these struggles, and
others, across their industry.

Meanwhile, an international wave of strikes in education, healthcare,
hospitality, transportation, and many other industries showcased the scale and
scope of workers' dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Together, we have the capacity to build a better, fairer, and more sustainable
future for workers all around the globe. If you're a worker in games, abuses
like mass layoffs, crunch, and harassment might seem like
unavoidable realities of the industry. But they don't have to be. Join us.